Titanic is now bigger even than Star Wars -- surpassing in early March the boxoffice take of both releases of George Lucas's space adventure combined. While I haven't seen the new champ as many times as they tell us those throngs of love-sick-for-Leonardo-di Caprio-teenage-girls have, I will admit to giving James Cameron more of my money than I usually like to dole out to moviemakers -- a feeling shared, no doubt, by those studios who teamed up to finance the film. But I'd guess at this late date the studios share my opinion that this added expense was money well spent.

The first time I saw Titanic was the second screening on opening day in Chicago. I took an impromptu break in Christmas shopping to run eight blocks to get to the theater on time, and the only seats available were in the very front row -- so I began the experience already out of breath and overwhelmed. My first impression was, obviously, of size -- not just the ship, though, but of the myth. From the first shot, I realized the traditional moral of this story -- the "punishment for hubris" lesson, i.e. "It was their own fault for sinking because they said they were unsinkable" -- can easily become a small-minded bit of hubris itself. No doubt the megalomania that viewed having adequate lifeboats as the real luxury on this liner was arrogant: the late 19th century explosion of science and technology inflated Western man's self-confidence to titanic proportions. Sadly, however, for that generation, and the next, and the next, the debunking of these big illusions didn't end with the sinking of one tiny boat.

So as I watched the passengers board in Southhampton for their one-way trip I saw that any effort to separate myself from their fate -- to find comfort in patronizing morals -- was to take the coward's way out: to put on a dress and sneak onto a lifeboat. For Titanic is a symbol for all human endeavor, even for humble people like ourselves. Somewhere, out there, is the ice-berg that will send each and every one of us to the icy, black depths.

This would seem a rather existentialist theme to be taken up by James Cameron, known for action-adventure movies where the hero invariably outfoxes death. One factor in this director's favor is that he has his own special effects company, and the special effects of Titanic are very special indeed. But you really don't need very much more than cool special effects for your average Arnold movie. Titanic, if you'll pardon the expression, is a deep subject -- and much deeper than two-miles down. The material cries out for an "Existentialist Fable" treatment. I would have loved to have seen the floating body sequence of Titanic shot by Ingmar Bergman, who might have given the scene an even spookier "River Styx" feel, and shown a better understanding that here is the ultimate fate of all humanity, lost in the void.

Of course, at the other end of the producer/director spectrum is Irwin Allen, famous for American Godzilla movies like The Towering Inferno -- and Titanic, at bottom (you must excuse my inability to resist these bad puns), is in some ways just a disaster movie. Somewhere in the middle -- between mythic idealism and crude literalism -- is Cameron. His Titanic is marvelous for detailed reconstruction of ship and story, yet the mythic structure of this particular story seems truly unsinkable. And, unlike those who grumbled against the director for making what Cameron himself admitted was an expensive "chick flick," I didn't mind the love story -- between Jack Dawson (DiCaprio), a young lower class roustabout, and Rose Something Something Bukator (Kate Winslet), a bored debutante. I understood the need for a storyline that would tour us around the ship, and I thought this particular love story worked in and of itself. And, given the love story and the sinking sequence were each the length of a regular film, you can't say one stole screen time from the other.

Still, I wouldn't have minded a few more brushstrokes on the larger "mythic" elements: if Titanic is a metaphor for life, where was the couple who wastes what the audience realizes is their last precious days together fighting; the parent too busy for his children; the guy who -- against the evidence -- refuses to believe the ship is sinking (and maybe runs to the ship's theater to watch a movie even as the boat is going down: it almost would have been worth the anachronism to make that point!); the crew members with their petty personal ambitions; the guys in the band arguing about "Art"? We did get the marvelous moment where the steward is chewing out Jack and Rose for destroying White Star line property as the boat is going down -- something that actually happened, as it turns out. But I wished for a little more of the proverbial "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic". (Cameron didn't even give us a literal picture of that classic reference to absurdly wasting one's efforts on an entirely hopeless cause, though he wasn't shy about depicting that other old saw, "rats escaping a sinking ship".)

Another nitpick -- and perhaps this only shows what I sick mind I have -- we never actually see anyone drowning: I mean a lungs-exploding, bubbles in the water, suffocating death. And isn't that the central fear of this whole story? True, most of the victims seem to have died by freezing to death, which is, I suppose, some consolation. Nevertheless, it seems an oversight for a director who makes sure to get plenty of footage of his naked heroine to be so discreet about the true horror of Titanic. But perhaps it is the nudity which violates the film's central theme of essential mystery and dignity in contrast to disclosure.

These nits are almost not worth picking when you remember that Cameron was shrewd enough to spend a good chunk of his two hundred million dollar budget on collecting actual footage of the wreck under the sea -- something I have a feeling Bergman might not have bothered to do. And, despite annoying commentary by the explorer character (Bill Paxton), the shots of Titanic's rusted opulance are worth the price of admission, and encapsulate the entire myth. At the end, the explorer confesses, "I've been living and breathing Titanic for years, but I realize now I never really got it." And, though I really don't have any complaints about his film, I'm not convinced Cameron "got" Titanic either.

For if there's a flaw in Cameron's script, it's not the love story versus the myth, but two other stories at odds -- a conflict one doesn't get the sense the screenwriter notices. The first story is that powerful moral of Titanic, summed up in a phrase Jack tells Rose: "Make it count." In other words, life is short. Don't let it pass without actually living. Here's a message we cannot hear enough. It's so easy to fall into unthinking routine, going through the motions, mindless obedience to convention. We can become comfortably numb and so miss our brief chance to experience deep, authentic relationships, the richness of beauty and intellectual depth, the miracle of every person and every moment. It was an advertising slogan a few years ago: "You only go around once in this life so you gotta grab for all the gusto you can." And there is much truth here.

And it is certainly true that the High Society lifestyle ideal in 1912 was in many ways the height of inauthenticity: rigidly class-conscious, obsessed with appearances and "good form". The "stuffiness" of conventions is symbolized when Rose is being stuffed into the era's characteristic torture-device, the corset.

Yet in walking the balance between mythic and realistic story-telling, there is always the danger of making conflicts into cartoons. Certainly the lower classes, while shown here as dancing belowdecks to wild Irish tunes, had its share of lives lived inauthentically. And the upper classes, though we dwell on the rigidness of Society in Titanic, surely counted among their number more than a few living lives to the fullest -- Robber Barrons and empire-builders, with their horse-races, fox hunts, and multitude of mistresses -- if there was gusto, they grabbed.

Early in the film, Rose compares Titanic to a prison ship taking her to slavery, by which she means a life circumscribed by upper crust conventions. But it seems borderline dumb to cast Titanic as a metaphor for prison, since we all know in the end everybody's going to be "escape" and be "free" from this "prison." Thus, it would seem that mindless "carpe diem" can also be unthinking convention, an impossible corset to stuff real life. Reducing freedom and order to a "good guy"/"bad guy" conflict is like being asked to choose between water and air. Sure, if you happened to be drowning, you might pick air. But guess what you'd be gasping for then with your last breath.

Which brings us to that other story, the one in conflict with "grabbing all the gusto you can." Among those who seized the day to "make it count," as Jack says, were the men who made it count by giving up their life for others -- including Jack, ironically. I'm talking about the men and women who stepped back from the lifeboats and knowingly went to their own deaths so other might live. This is the part of Titanicthat bathes the whole tale with an awe-full holy glow. Some such reports of chivalry during Titanic's last moments have been exaggerated. Nevertheless, the phrase we most associate with the story represents an Edwardian convention, one outdated today, i.e. "Women and Children First".

For if self-fulfillment is what it means to "make it count," and convention is for saps, than those White Western Males who followed the convention of "women and children first" were saps. And, instead of being the bad guy, Rose's fiance Cal (Billy Zane) -- who lies his way onto a lifeboat by snatching up a lost child he claims is his own -- should be the real hero: the finest exemplar of carpe diem (which in this case might be rendered "Seize the Kid!") What's the difference between the rich girl who throws off convention to enjoy a torrid sex scene with a steerage hunk, and the First Class gentleman who spurns convention -- you know, those stifling, bankrupt values like "Duty" and "Honor" which the subsequent Lost Generation writers so loved to mock -- to preserve his own Self? Cal manifestly "made it count": like Jack, he stubbornly refused to give up.

So did Titanic passenger Bruce Ismay, Managing Director of the White Star line, who likewise saved his own skin. In one of the film's most powerful moments, the character playing Ismay (Jonathon Hyde) snakes his way into a lifeboat. The scene raises some uncomfortable questions in the minds of the audience: Would I do that? Would I, when push came to shove, behave in an honorable or dishonorable way? Despite the fact our own society has long rejected those stuffy Edwardian conventions about women, children, and honor, most of us still see Ismay's action as dishonorable. And so did he, it seems: for the rest of his life.

Too bad Cameron didn't explore these questions raised by Titanic and even by his own treatment of that myth: namely, what does it mean to make one's life count? And what is the nature of Duty? How about a conversation between Titanic's Edwardian Masters of the Universe over their brandy and cigars about what they actually believed -- some background on the now almost-incomprehensible notions of "Honor" and "Ought." Then maybe a young person, even Jack, a proto-Lost Generation skeptic, asking about the connection between their Darwinian jungle law and their morality. For if anything has been "sinkable," it is the moral code of those who reject the religious foundations for morality.

If I hadn't figured it out yet, I'd have really known Ingmar Bergman didn't make this film when, in the end, as the elderly Rose (Gloria Stuart) dies in bed, the audience is treated to a vision of her joining the other passengers in Titanic's restored, and apparently eternal (unsinkable?) glamour. Cameron has been cagey about what this scene means. I suspect he didn't intend this as a true vision of the afterlife, but as a picture of the immortality of Titanic in our hearts. (I just wondered why only the "good" people were immortalized in this resurrected Titanic.)

The existentialist sort might argue that ending a film about the inevitability of death with a quasi-religious feelgood punchine is the height of inauthenticity. Or at best, a bit of violin music as we all slip under the waves. For, of course, if Titanic had been done as an existentialist fable, the lifeboats would have all sunk, too. And there would have been no resurrection, no detailed and glorious restoration of lost dreams, and no survivors. The message would be human beings can't make anything count because, against the infinite depths, nothing does. Heroism, goodness, even romance, are rearranging deck chairs. And, it goes without saying, religion is just one more leaky lifeboat which ultimately provides no real escape from this fate.

Probably the happy ending was a better choice if Titanic was to have any hope of beating Star Wars as all-time boxoffice king.

Yet the question remains, is Titanic about facing death or escaping it? The answer is up to the viewer: one can "seize the day" by watching the film as many times as possible, drowning in a fantasy of lost elegance restored, secure in the fact that it's happening to somebody else and we'll all live to see it yet again. Or, one can make Titanic count by shaking off a mindless submission to our own consumer conventions, facing real despair as necessary prerequisite to finding real hope. For there is truly something there -- one can stand back like the California crew staring unthinking at the Titanic's pretty distress rockets on the horizon. Or one can pursue the interesting fact we all seem to instinctively agree with that there the most noble sort of carpe diem recognizes limits on mindless grabbing of gusto. That the absence of all constraints do not necessarily make for the kind of "freedom" worth having. Indeed, once you've admitted to yourself a moral component to "making it count," you'll find you've already taken your first steps in walking on the water.